Dear D4 players and team
I would like to share my experience with the Paragon system in the game as a passionate player, who was once second to Eu with WD in D3.
I greatly value the strategic depth and challenges of D4, but I find Paragon’s system excessively complicated to understand, assign and manage points, it is cumbersome, and also one at a time…
It is almost impossible to understand and optimize it without external help from calculators or websites. This does not allow me to experience the richness and variety of other possibilities or configure my own paragon according to my build, but rather limits me to playing the builds published in online guides only for their panels.
Given the overwhelm of the paragon system, I suggest considering a simplification of its synergies, simpler, clearer and more intuitive.
Thanks and greetings
3 Likes
Please don’t make this game any more simple or easy. I enjoy just a hint of balanced complexity in an arpg and personally I don’t feel like the paragon system is too complicated. The skill trees are simple by design, the paragon system should be more interesting in order to balance that.
3 Likes
Paragon Board in D4 is completely broken with ideas.
It is unclear, messy, confuse, overwhelmed.
I think Blizzard has now problem what to do with this part of game and probably they will not solve it (to do that they must wipe this horrible idea and create something new and better…never happen!)
2 Likes
Another great thing about the game. In their rush to steal ideas from PoE, they forgot that they don’t have the brains to implement a board that big.
Free the Paragon!
Stop the paragon oppression!
I would like a more complex paragon board and more complex skill trees to be honest. I prefer more complex action rpgs.
6 Likes
Paragon in D4 is terrible. End of story.
It only holds simple stats but it a visual clusterf.
It is like you get the job to make a simple Omelette. Easy task. Ya.
Until you realiser you have 700 spices in the cuppoard and all of em are in the same bottle with the same inscription and the same color.
All you need ate a handful of spices and you know exactly which ones but you need half the day to cook it cause of it.
2 Likes
Yeah, actually, now that you mention it: why the F can’t we color code the +5 main stat nodes?
Don’t know, red for strength, yellow for int, green for dexterity and maybe light blue for willpower?
It would at least make it a LITTLE more understandable, cause yeah, you can tell the icons are different but only if you’re zoomed in. When you’re trying to figure out a way from one node to the other, you HAVE to zoom out further. (Thank you, my vision is fine, it’s just that the icons aren’t really all that different.)
For now, let’s not open the discussion how the +5 mainstat nodes are virtually worthless, outside of getting your selected glyphs’ secondary bonus.
If you really look at the paragon board you will notice that there isn’t actually a lot there it just seems like there’s more there then there really is
1 Like
This is all your choice. It is really quite easy to ignore build guides. You only have to engage that thing between your ears.
2 Likes
Sorry OP but I respectfully disagree. Once you understand that all you really need to shoot for on the Paragon board is the multipliers, it becomes very simple. That’s all you do. Take the shortest path to the biggest multiplier. Additive damage/stats should be almost entirely put on gear since it rolls so much higher.
It’s really not that difficult to understand it and setup a board.
It’s difficult to figure out the best path and nodes to pick, but the difference is little. It’s basically the min/maxer part which means that the paragon boards do exactly what they’re supposed to. Allow casual gamers to use them but make it slightly better if you spend time min/maxing them.
There are a few ways of looking at the boards imo:
- How many legendary nodes do you need to make your build work as best as it can (usually 1-2)
- How glyphs do you need to maximize your multipliers (usually 5-7)
- What bonuses do you need from Magic/Rare nodes (as few as possible, additive is not typically worth it unless it’s on the path to the next glyph / legendary)
- What order should the boards be so that if you can’t enable a secondary affix on a node, it’s unimportant to your build (e.g., +resistance to something you’re already capped on)
- What’s the most efficient way through the board to get everything you need (spend ~30 points per board and just get and enable the glyph in the socket to maximize the number of glyphs or get as many legendary/rare/glyphs as possible without going bust).
I normally find myself using 5 boards + glyphs with 1-2 legendary nodes, and I max out the multiplier on 1 or 2 of the glyphs that give me the biggest benefit whilst using the minimal bonus on the others. I socket ones that have a multiplier to rare/magic nodes of a certain type in the board they have the biggest impact of course, if these are even used in the board at all.
However you choose to setup your board, it’s not really “wrong”.
It may be less efficient but unless you’re literally picking +damage to enemies affected with damage over time when you have 0 damage over time in your build, you’re not doing it wrong.
Following a guide is how gaming has gone the past decade or so, people generally don’t want to figure stuff out, we’re in the generation of games that was instant gratification without effort (the people that got participation trophies).
Your damage and survivability from gear, affixes, tempers, masterworking, and your skill tree are what you need to focus on most. The paragon board just caps things and ensures you get the most out of what you’ve already setup. If your gear/skill tree is bad, it doesn’t matter how good your paragon board setup is, you’ll still be trash.
If Blizzard were to change paragon, there’s a few things I’d like to see though:
- New Legendary Glyphs (we know are coming): expand range at level 15, then at level 21 (cap at 25-30). Get an additional bonus at each 21 (or +80 stat). You get 3 buffs instead of 2. This is quite possibly what we’re getting.
- New Unique Glyphs: Each unique glyph will be specific to a spell, build, stat, and only 1 unique can be active at a time and requires n paragon (maybe 100) to be spent on the board it’s socketed in. It would act like a Legendary glyph, cap at the same point, but grants bonuses to ALL nodes on the board in addition to its unique effect or something like that.
- Fewer basic stat paragons with potentially smaller boards and more efficient pathing, to allow us to grab all the glyphs we want AND still pick up some nice rare/magic nodes along the way.
- Boards with more than 1 glyph socket (maybe no legendary nodes)
- Boards with more than 1 legendary power (maybe no glyph sockets)
- Rare/Magic nodes that don’t seem to be in conflict with the boards they’re on (such as critical strike on a dot board or overpower not on the overpower board etc…)
- Boards that require x points to be spent in another board, all paragon points are doubled or something like that, so it’s more like a skill tree.
I think the system does not need to get simpler, however I good improvement that I believe would help in the planning would be allowing to “prepare” your board ahead of levelling.
Like instead of having to make all points to attach a new board, one could setup all intended boards previously and then put the points in each level.
It would also be nice to have a respec system similar to the skills ones, that would let us detach the boards without the need to remove all points, etc.
1 Like
Kinda torn on this tbh, part of me wants to say Paragon Board should be with much less powerful Legendary nodes and start from earlier, say lvl20
Then have the legos upgraded/improved via drops (much like glyphs), and then make sure there are more types of drops in the game itself (baseline) than just gems and gear
IDK, the game just feels too much “prebaked” IMO, not sure if Paragon is the place or Temper manuals or whatever, just needs to be less “prebaked” and those options be not as game-breaking as are (or at least not from right of the bat just picking them up) 
As an ARPG player I don’t find Diablo 4’s Paragon Board system complicated. I think it is simple and poor, I just think that it is not synergistic and does not explore its potential much, it could have a better explanation and be more intuitive
Yea exactly. 99% of the paragon board have no influence on the actual gameplay. Only the legendary notes.
You could basicly strip away everything else and you woukld literaly only lose %dmg.
Paragonboard is like many designs in D4 a total disaster. You cannot even call it anything else.
Honestly the game is overall a broken mess. There is no coherend game.
Chars balance alkl over the place, World bosses die ibn seconds, Loot is broken, Story is obsolete.
Honestly if i would still be studiying game design and i would had made D4 and had shown it my prof he would had literly kicked me out of the class. There is almost everything broken in D4 that can be broken.
Only in the Videogame industry can you deliver such a broken product and not get your A§§ kicked for it.
Easy to play hard to master used to be a motto at blizz I hear what you’re saying though.
The system needs to be easier to understand also itemisation needs to be less convoluted.
I want bosses with cool mechanics not artificial one shot difficulty…… a real fight
2 Likes
See that was where D3 was the best at. At least pre Powercreep smart loot RoS.
The base game had some very well designed bosses with good mechanics and the chayr bnalance was very solid.
Even with all it’s flaws i consider Vanilla D3 the best Diablo game ever made. Even better then D2 in the overall combined view.
I dunno how people got so upset with D3 and now we got D4 which terrible and yet it does not have the bad reputation D3 had.
Strange world this is.
1 Like
- Prioritize boards with the legendary nodes you want to implement.
- Prioritize the glyphs you want to implement.
- Implement those boards and glyphs while leveling up and don’t worry about endgame.
- When you are near 100, you can look at your board, see the useful nodes and paths, and refund all and start it over.
Might take a few tries, but it is just part of the game.
Alternative: Let someone else do it for you and just follow their design. meh.
1 Like
I’d like to see the paragon board made a bit less jumbled, and the skill tree given a LOT more options.
1 Like